The pale blue dimensional passage slowly closed behind them.
Saitama walked at the front, his steps light, as if he had just come out of a convenience store rather than escaped from a world-ending battle.
A string of people followed behind him.
No one spoke.
Knov walked in the middle of the group, his fingers still held in the position from maintaining the passage, not having lowered them for a long while. Ginta and Kanzai guarded the rear on either side, their footsteps producing dull echoes against the grayish-white floor. Gon, Killua, and Leorio walked in the middle, each lost in his own thoughts. None of them spoke first.
Genos trailed at the very end, his optical lenses occasionally sweeping across the thin layer of dust on the floor, as if confirming something.
The entire group was too quiet for people who had just finished a battle.
They were more like people whose throats had been caught by something, trying to digest an event too overwhelming to process.
At the end of the passage, light from the outside streamed in.
It was not the uniform, lifeless, cold white light of the Fourth-Dimensional Apartment.
It was the sunset.
Orange-red, warm, real daylight.
Saitama stepped through the dimensional rift.
The wind rushed toward him, carrying the smell of scorched earth and that dry, acrid scent unique to smoke after it had finally dispersed.
He narrowed his eyes.
Before him lay land that had been thoroughly plowed apart.
Buildings had collapsed, and broken walls stood crookedly like snapped teeth. Huge ravines split the ground, and in the deepest places, dark-red rock layers could be seen below. Broken utility poles lay across the roadside, their wires drooping and swaying gently in the wind. A few trees in the distance had not completely fallen yet,